I am very new to the AS community so please bear with me. I have been an odd person since early childhood. I've been mostly a loner, sometimes by choice and sometimes through bullying and rejection of kids my own age who pushed me a way. I've always been a daydreamer and I've always had eccentric interests in trains, botany, eastern religious, existentialist novels, etc. I always talked in a funny, literary sort of way like a character in a Shakespeare play or someone else from a different time and place, and people have found this weird and unapproachable. I barely passed high school because the noise and commotion and bullying made me very anxious so I cut school a lot and read and studied in the woods outside of school. My teachers said I would fail all my subjects but I aced everything in my junior and senior year and graduated. For seven years I wandered around in confusion rejected by everyone I tried to get close to, but I was accepted by some homosexuals from school who it turns out only wanted to use my body. When I started college in 1973 I was immediately flagged for special attention and was steered to the Vocational Rehabilitation program. My counsellor told my companion behind my back that she believed I could never hold a job. I went to community college for two years a straight A student and got into Vassar College, an Ivy league school, on the strength of an interview in which the interviewer later related to the friend of my companion that I interviewed her and because of the rigor of it she felt compelled to recommend that I be accepted. I fell in love with social scientific research methodology and statistics in college and too courses and designed research projects to employ it. I felt isolated in college as I made no friends and spend most of my time with key privileges at the Library, the Cartography lab, and the Computer center. I couldn't handle a regular major so I designed an independent major in The Scientific Study of Religion in which I designed the courses and worked with three mentors to discuss my research as it progressed. I graduated with highest honors. After graduation I became confused about what to do and briefly attended a seminary, library school and Fordham University where I studied Philosophy and then Sociology. I dropped out of all these programs and went to work initially as a Church Planner, then as a salesman of electronic test equipment, then as an abstractor at a law firm, then as a computer salesman and then as a market researcher. I enjoyed all of these jobs at least for a while until I got bored and the structure became too oppressive. Then I moved from New York to Texas where I mistakenly went to Nursing school and learned what oppressive structure was all about. I dropped out in my last semester. During my time in Texas I was diagnosed with a chronic pain disorder, fibromyalgia syndrome, and began obsessively cataloguing and obtaining all books and journal articles on fibromyalgia syndrome and therapies using only the hands. I compiled an index to all published works on massage and related hands on therapies then privately published it and began to market it to massage schools and therapists in the US and Canada. I began to earn money which encouraged me to search harder to find even more writings on the subject. I moved back to my home in New York and spend a couple of years finding massage related books and journal articles and selling reprints of old works. I found it very satisfying to do research and earn money from doing it. During that time I wrote two books on the history of massage and was asked to give lectures about my research to schools throughout North America. I was also asked to deliver an address to the American Massage Therapy Association on Fibromyalgia syndrome and massage. I quickly wrote a book on the subject derived from my research notes, gave the talk, sold many copies of my book and was asked to teach courses on the subject which I did from 1990 to 2003, when everything collapsed. Then I tried to work as a nurse to earn money after I moved to Florida, but clients, kept telling my agencies, that I was weird, and that people didnt want me around. I've tried to do sales again, but relationship selling of consumer goods baffles me whereas as selling by technical expertise I always found easy. Now, at 63 I have no job, my companion said she is thinking of leaving me, her 12 year old daughter who I've known since she was born and who I consider my own daughter feels uncomfortable with me and moved out to live with her biological father. And to try to stave off abandonment I have had to help my companion analyse the stock market minute which I find very stressful and confusing. I am a great research in an era of self research via the internet. I am a nurse unfit to practice. I am an unwanted teacher and salesman. I am a paralegal without the five to tend years experience needed to get a job. And I look and feel old and sickly, so much so that pursuing my special interests even in collecting sacred choral music for the dead and Lent is proving exhausting. I am in a quandry as to what to do to survive, and I need guidance from anyone of good will. Hear me, please!
21 Nov 2009, 5:28 am
. You sound like you have a lot to offer and I think at the very least you will find people here you will enjoy exchanging ideas with. Apologies to my mother the grammar police (ending sentence with preposition).
